Victor Conte Interview

"Lance Armstrong Is As Guilty As A $3 Bill"

Victor Conte on how athletes get ahead legally

Steroids seems to be the biggest name in the household when it comes to performance-enhancing drugs, but what about amphetamines? In baseball, for example, the general perception is that steroids makes you hit the ball further, but it doesn’t necessarily help you connect ball to bat. An amphetamine would do that.

VC: I believe that central-nervous stimulants are very powerful performance-enhancing stimulants. This argument by Bud Selig that they don’t really enhance performance, he doesn’t have a clue. Especially over the course of a 162-game season, the amount of energy it takes and how drained these guys are… everybody knows that the use of "greenies" and other stimulants was rampant for decades and decades. Are they performance-enhancing? Absolutely.

I don’t know how many therapeutic-use exemptions baseball has granted, but it’s a significant percentage. In the neighborhood of 20% of guys out there have Adderall and other types of attention-deficit-disorder stimulants that they are taking.

Football is way worse than baseball, though, and let me explain why. Baseball, I believe, uses the stimulant list of WADA (World Anti Doping Agency) — I believe they are in the neighborhood of 60 different stimulants — so the usage in baseball is significantly less. But is caffeine a powerful stimulant? It certainly is. Would caffeine enhance performance? It certainly does.

Now let’s talk about the NFL. I talked personally to John Lombardo, the drug advisor for the NFL (back in 2003), and if you look at their policy carefully, what it said then was "certain stimulants" — and there was a list of eight stimulants. That’s like saying the front doors to the barn are closed, but the ones on the side are wide open. My recent understanding is that they’ve updated the list, and while WADA has increased their list by about 20, the NFL has increased theirs from eight to 10 stimulants.

Here’s what that means: Just go ahead and take one of the other 50, just make sure you don’t pick these 10 and you can have all of the stimulants that you like.

But how do amphetamines improve performance?

VC: Enhancing reaction time, mental alertness, concentration. I believe they even make you faster.

In baseball, for your overall performance, stimulants are the most powerful performance enhancer. In other sports, like boxing, MMA and track and field, I’d say EPO.

Do you believe sports would be boring if there was a true crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs? Less home runs, slower speeds, less world records broken, etc?

VC: I wouldn’t use the word "boring." I would put it in the context that I don’t believe it’s fair to ask today’s athletes to compete with records that are, in my opinion, tainted.

I’ll give you an example: Anabolic steroids have a much more powerful effect on women than they do upon men because a man has 10 times the amount of circulating testosterone than a female, naturally.

When you go back and look, and if you isolate track and field, and you look at the 100, 200, 400 800, 1,500 meters, 100-meter hurdles, 400-meter hurdles, triple jump, the weight event shot-put, heptathlon, my opinion is that 100% of their records are tainted and were achieved by athletes taking steroids. And let’s look at when those records were achieved: in the 1970s and the 1980s. FloJo [Florence Griffith-Joyner] is the most recent in 1988. The 400-meter record was set in 1985, and we’re in 2011, so it’s almost 30 years old. Tracks are faster, there is better nutrition, better training methods, etc. And nobody can touch it.

Ultimately, this leads to the argument: What do we do — rip up all of the record books? Is it fair to ask them to compete against the record books?

If you’ve got a bunch of athletes already in the Baseball Hall of Fame that have used performance-enhancing drugs, is it fair to keep those now that are using performance-enhancing drugs? Also, some of the athletes that didn’t use may have faced a pitcher that used steroids. Or Barry Bonds, if he was on steroids, there’s a good chance he was facing pitchers that were on steroids.

In short, I’m suggesting there might be a level playing field, but maybe different than the one everyone thought there was.